Salaquarda tops second Brno test

In its maiden year in the category, Salaquarda's family-run ISR team appeared on course for a one-two for much of the session. Spa winner Esteban Guerrieri acquitted himself strongly on his return to ISR, having made way for rapid Alexander Rossi in Monaco.

A late effort from championship leader Mikhail Aleshin split the pairing, though the Russian remained some four tenths off Salaquarda's time of 1m43.322s, while Guerrieri had the satisfaction of being fastest of the drivers running with the low-downforce aerodynamic configuration that will be mandatory in Saturday's first race.

"We wanted to try a long run to see how the car would work in tomorrow's race," said Guerrieri, "but unfortunately I couldn't do it because there were too many red flags. However, I believe if you have a good car for qualifying, you shouldn't have too many problems for the race, although we could make a couple of small adjustments."

One of three drivers to have competed in Brno's Auto GP round in April, Julian Leal took fourth spot for Draco, but the former Italian F3000 champion triggered the first of three red flags in the session.

Keisuke Kunimoto and Brendon Hartley were the other offenders. Kiwi Hartley's incident caused the final stoppage with less than two minutes on the clock and denied several drivers a final opportunity to topple Salaquarda's benchmark.

Fourth to sixth was covered by just 0.010s. Leal's Draco team-mate Nathanael Berthon ended the afternoon in fifth place, ahead of British Formula 3 champion Daniel Ricciardo

The session got off to an unusual start with a depleted field of 16 cars on track. In a hangover from incidents in the opening session, Jake Rosenzweig, Ricciardo, Stefano Coletti, Anton Nebylitskiy, Victor Garcia, Bruno Mendez and Sergio Canamasas were forced to sit out the opening 15 minutes for yellow flag infringements, while Junior Lotus Racing's Daniil Move lost half an hour from his potential 75 minutes of running for red flag offences.